Bristol Brings Back the Excitement
5/5/05
ay
what you will about lousy track prep or the lack of side-by-side
racing, but I thought the recent NHRA race at Bristol provided
some great entertainment. The sight of two Top Fuelers or
Nitro Coupes clawing for traction and dueling it out in
a smoke-fest quite obviously brought the crowd to its feet
and made for some exciting TV viewing.
Now, I know some of you out there are going
to argue that’s not drag racing, that it’s unsafe,
that the race should be decided strictly by flat-out E.T.,
not by who can pedal a car better, but I’d argue that
what we saw at Bristol was truer to the heritage of fuel
racing than many of the cookie-cutter events we routinely
witness.
Watch an old movie like Funny Car Summer (1974)
and you’ll see plenty of guardrail-to-guardrail passes,
with drivers barely containing their fire-breathing mechanical
beasts, or seek out some footage of the early front-motored
diggers smoking their tires the full length
ADVERTISEMENT
 |
|
of the track.
I think you’d have to agree—a lack of traction
can make for a great show.
I
don’t think it’s any accident that back in the
‘60s and ‘70s, drag racing permeated a wider
cross-section of American life. It was the original extreme
sport, the thing you watched because there was just nothing
else like it. Drag racing was exciting and dangerous and
rebellious and unpredictable and I firmly believe that’s
why it was embraced so willingly by pop culture.
There were drag racers in commercials and
print ads beyond the traditional automotive media. As a
teenager, I clearly recall Roger Gustin’s Lava soap
commercials on TV with his jet Funny Car and Don Garlits
in full-page magazine ads promoting the U.S. Navy.
And there were toys, too. Find me one boy
from the mid-‘70s who didn’t at least know about
the “Snake” versus “Mongoose” Hot
Wheels cars. And access to plastic models of the rides of
“Jungle Jim” Liberman, Bill “Grumpy”
Jenkins, and Gene “The Snowman” Snow—among
many others—was no farther away than the local discount
department store.
Heck, I grew up in southern Ontario, a long,
long way from any hotbed of drag racing and I knew of and
loved all of those guys. Drag racing may not have been on
TV every weekend and the Internet was still just a gleam
in some space-age-thinking military programmer’s eye,
but it still made an impact through months-old coverage
in magazines and the odd appearance in sit-coms and movies.
Think of the famous Munsters episode in which
Herman and Grandpa go drag racing to defend the family honor.
Heck, just think of the drag racing influence on all the
custom cars that shows of the day featured. Now try to imagine
a modern show doing the same thing. (To be fair, I do recall
Christopher Titus doing a drag-themed story a couple of
years back in his entertaining, but short-lived series.)
